“No.” I tried to curl into a ball, but he straightened my legs with no difficulty. I tried to roll off the bed as nausea welled, but he held me with one powerful, hairy arm and continued to tickle while I grew sore from laughter.
“O.K.,” I pleaded. “O.K.”
He stopped. A few more guffaws ached my head, but I stood up.
“You want to get out of here, or you want to get out of here?” he asked reasonably. “Dealer can get you out. He got Ressner out.”
“He got Ressner out?”
I forced myself up and looked at Sklodovich. The pattern of bars cast by moonlight through the window made him look as mad as he surely was.
“Dealer’s been in this place for years, longer than anybody. Psychiatry staff is meeting now. They meet every night about now. It’ll be at least an hour before they break up and anyone could think of coming here to check us. Let’s move. See if the door’s locked.”
I put on the robe he handed me and took the slippers he shoved into my hand. Standing wasn’t easy, but I did it.
I shuffled to the door and tried it. It was locked.
Sklodovich put his ear to the door, listened for a moment, and rapped twice on the wall to the left. Someone on the other side returned the two rasps and Sklodovich smiled.
“What’s Dealer’s problem?” Sklodovich asked.
“I don’t know. I never even heard of him till you mentioned him.”
“I meant that you should ask me what his problem is. I was prompting you,” said Sklodovich, taking a small wire from the heel of his right slipper and carefully placing it in the lock.
“O.K. What’s his problem?”
“He’s a prisoner. Sometimes he’s in a German prison camp or concentration camp and he’s a Jew or a British officer. Sometimes he’s in a Japanese labor compound and he’s an American sergeant. Or he’s a counterrevolutionary in a Siberian work gang. Sometimes he’s very specific. Once he was the man in the iron mask. Another time he was Edmund Dantes in the Chateau d’If.”
“He sounds like a big help.”
“I think so too. Come on.”
The small wire made a clicking sound in the door, which opened slightly. Sklodovich peeped out and scanned the floor in both directions before darting into the room next door, from which he had received the two answering raps. I followed, robe wrapped tightly, slippers flopping.
Sklodovich closed the door, and we faced a small, birdlike man with wild gray hair and huge saucer eyes, which bulged in a look of constant surprise. The white-gowned creature eyed me for several seconds, then reached up, pulled Sklodovich’s head down, and whispered in a loud voice:
“A guy came wit you.”
“I know,” Sklodovich replied in the same stage whisper. “He’s with me.”
“You are sure?”
“Yes. Are you?”
“Me? Me? Me?” said the bird, his great eyes darting about in astonishment. “What did you ask me?”
“He’s with me.”
“Good.” He looked in triumph at me and scratched his head. A few wisps of hair rose ridiculously. “Just want to be sure, you know. Tell me,” he whispered again, pulling Sklodovich’s sleeve into a crinkly mess, “are they still out there?”
“No. Look out there for yourself.”
“Me? Me? Me? Look out there? No tank you, buster. Not me. What you think I am?” He looked at me for an answer, but I could supply none, since I didn’t think anything about him other than he was a genuine madman.
“Toby and I have got to see Dealer.”
“Toby?”
“This is Toby. He came with me.”
“I see,” said the man sagely. “Come wit me.” He turned into the room which looked exactly like our own except for a closet where we had a blank wall. One bed was neatly made. In the other, a large bulge under a crazy-quilt blanket was shivering with fear, illness, or shock. The bird opened the closet door.
“They maybe ain’t there now,” he mumbled, moving boxes from the closet floor to one side, “but open that door and they’ll be there so fast, it’ll make you pee-pee in you pants I tell ya.”
Sklodovich nodded, reached down, and removed a plasterboard panel from the back of the closet wall. Beyond the panel I could see a tile floor. Sklodovich stepped through the hole and motioned me to follow. I stepped into a large bathroom, and the bird replaced the plasterboard and whispered: “You think I don’t know they out there you got anudder think?”
“Who does he think is outside the door?”
“I don’t know,” said Sklodovich. “He’d rather not say.”
Sklodovich listened at the door for a second, then strode to the nearest stall to the accompaniment of swirling water in the line of automatic constantly flushing cleanser-needful urinals.
I followed.
Inside the stall, above the toilet, was a small, metal door painted battleship gray. Sklodovich pulled it open.
“Up the pipe,” he whispered, pointing his finger up the dark shaft beyond the door.
At first I thought he was muttering a dark-purpled curse against pipes and tubular constructions. After all, he was, by confession and choice, a lunatic. Headfirst, Sklodovich disappeared through the hole.
“Close the door behind you,” his voice echoed seconds after his slippered toes vanished.
Reaching into the darkness, I felt a moist water pipe and began to pull myself painfully into the darkness, pausing to close the metal door behind me.
There I balanced, clinging to a wet pipe with one hand and both legs while with my other hand I attempted to close a heavy metal door that had no handle on the inside, nothing but a protruding bolt, which I struggled to grasp with unprotected fingers.
Plunged in darkness, my fear increased. How many floors below me did this blackness fall? If my grip and the surrounding wall in the narrow tunnel failed me, would I zip down into a limbo like razor blades into those shafts in hotel bathrooms? And up? What was up above me except the retreating sound of Sklodovich’s breathing?
Using the wall, a jagged mass of rough bricks, and piping, I managed to follow within hearing distance of my guide. I skinned my right arm on an unidentified outcropping, and my wet hands kept slipping, but I rested without too much difficulty by holding the pipe and letting my rear end rest against a smooth section of wall. I continued like this in the timelessness of darkness for a period of between two minutes and four hours.
My back ached, but I climbed upward. My pajama bottoms slipped, but I grappled upward. My palms blistered, but I moved onward. My foot found an exceptionally good hold on a protruding brick and I pushed myself forward and found a long, thin face gazing at me. The face included a mouth that hung stupidly open, inches from me. A gray stubble of beard surrounded the open mouth, which reveled a pitted and not very pleasant tongue. I almost let go.
Sklodovich’s face replaced the one that had startled me.
“Where have you been, Toby? I thought you changed your mind. Hell, I guess there aren’t many men who can make it up the shaftway as quickly as I can. Dynamic tension does it. With nothing but dynamic tension Charles Atlas got strong enough to pull railroad cars. Think of that. Railroad cars. A man who can pull railroad cars doesn’t get sand kicked in his face at the beach, or anywhere else. You know Atlas volunteered to beef up old Gandhi in India?”
“Can I come in? My feet are slipping.”
“Sure, I’m sorry,” said Sklodovich, helping me through the hole, which turned out to be another shaftway entrance in another washroom like the one we had left. I stepped over the toilet and leaned against the wall to catch my breath.
A man with his mouth open stood there with his pajamas at his feet, watching us. He was very tall and thin and leaned forward with rounded shoulders. His grayish skin made him look like a wilted stalk of celery. He had obviously been interrupted while seated.
“Let’s go,” said Sklodovich, walking to the door.
“Does he know what we’re doing here?” I asked.
“He?”
“This man,” I said, nodding toward the celery-man, whose look of astonishment was firmly frozen on his face.